Tech

Although Dreamhost gets criticized for occasional service outages, I've been very happy with the service provided for the price charged. At around $10/month anyone, at least in the developed world, can afford to have a personal publishing and development platform. That's incredibly powerful!

If I were running a "mission critical" web application, I may not pick Dreamhost as my hosting platform. But in that case I'd be looking at the offerings from Amazon Web Service or Google's App Engine. They are inherently more scalable for production commercial sites.

Dreamhost offers a lot of features that make my life easier, but one of their newer features I've started to take advantage of is Subversion. Dreamhost's web panel allows users to create Subversion repositories, manage Subversion users, etc. They support webdav access, although I prefer to do my development on their shell using the svn client with a local path to the repository.

Being able to keep my People Keeper application in a Subversion repository at Dreamhost has been very handy. If you're a Dreamhost customer who does any sort of development and you weren't aware of this feature, I suggest checking it out. Revision control is critical in any software or web development project, and Subversion is a very popular package.